This was supposed to be the Roman version of a Burmese tea salad, but then my husband convinced me to add an avocado.

THE first time I tried a Burmese tea salad, I immediately started trying to figure out how to make them at my house all of the time.  They are amazing: you should go to a place that makes them and put said salad into your face at the first possible opportunity.

BUT I could not figure out how to buy high quality fermented tea leaves.  I gave up my hopes and tempered my love for these salads with the quite unreasonably long wait outside of the local Burmese place.  Very small tragedy.

HAPPILY, I started reading Apicus - a cookbook from ancient Rome. (There are a lot of great vegetable recipes. Every recipe marked "for vegetarians" has calf's brains in it. There are no desserts. Salt is always added as a brine.) What if I took some traditional Roman vegetables, and added a Burmese twist?  I could still use the fried shallots (fried shallots are the best) and the chopped romaine (for crunch: a salad is still delightfully crunchy if it is 10% romaine instead of 80%. Pro tip.) I could use kale instead of tea leaves, I could replace peanuts with walnuts, I could use parmesan instead of fish sauce (yes I know garum is very very Roman but it's a salad few people want fermented fish on their salad.) and cucumbers instead of tomatoes: it would be great!

THEN the spouse convinced me to add an avocado. It was an amazing salad entirely because of the avocado. You know what makes it more amazing? Abandoning the Roman thing almost altogether, and using chopped cilantro or mangos or tomatoes, replacing the walnuts with sesame seeds and chopped peanuts, and adding olive oil.  Olive oil makes most things better.

Serves 4
Slice one large shallot thinly, and place over medium heat with a little oil.  Fry until crisp, stirring frequently to prevent burning.  Add a little salt.  This takes about ten minutes.

Tear one bag or one and a half bunches of fresh, crisp kale into bite-sized pieces.  Salt. Microplane about an ounce of parmesan cheese onto the kale; add a tablespoon of olive oil and toss gently so every leaf has a little bit of cheese on it to make up for the fact that it is not a carefully fermented tea leaf. (you could also use soy sauce or Bragg's or nutritional yeast, maybe.)

See how I've divided the ingredients into equal pie-chart slices? Do that, it looks nice, and then you look real smooth mixing it at the table.  You are going to add one or more of each of the following ingredients:

A small romaine heart, chopped (this is enormous; you may need to excavate a small pit in the kale for your lettuce.)
A half cup to full cup of a sweet thing like mangos, apples, pears, peaches, peppers, or tomatoes. 
A chopped avocado
A quarter cup of chopped herbs like cilantro, green onions, or mint (this is optional.)
A quarter cup of crunchy nut-like things such as peanuts, walnuts, pumpkin seeds, or sesame seeds.

Put the fried shallots in the center to disguise how badly the segments connect.

Look how pretty that is!  So pretty!

Now squeeze a lemon over it and stir it up and serve it.

Insalata Primavera

I think I might be the only person on Earth who eats pasta primavera and thinks "What's with all the annoying pasta?" I prefer to have this flavor dense salad. If you wanted to turn this into pasta primavera, you could add 1/2 lb of cooked spaghetti or penne at the end.

Shell about a pound of fava beans in the pod. Unless the beans are very young, (smaller than a pea) peel off the outer coat of the bean. Take a moment to be happy that you eat this foundation of pre-Columbian European cuisine once a year. Yay Phaseolus domesitcation events!

Slice the white parts of two or three bulbs of green garlic- or 2 or 3 spring onions- or all of the above. Saute gently in oil in a large pan for about five minutes.

Stem one pound (one bunch) of asparagus. Break (or cut) into two inch slices. Add the fava beans to the garlic pan and saute for about three minutes. Add the asparagus and continue to saute until bright green.

Remove from heat and drizzle with olive oil and a generous coating of black pepper. Add about 1/2 cup of chopped Italian parsley. Stir. Eat.

Minestrone

The original recipe was raw- it still lives somewhere on VegWeb. I read said recipe on Game Night after the initial round of Nuclear War left me with no viable population and a looseleaf notebook full of Cheyenne's recipes. I scanned it, but I was trying to memorize the entire notebook in one gulp, so my recollections are somewhat fuzzy. I know that there was lovingly homemade tomato juice and raw mushrooms and all sorts of vegetables that are never in season at the same time. This is a loose, loose adaptation. It's loose enough that I might make the actual recipe later and post that too.

Serves 3.

Get 16 oz. pureed tomatoes from some source. Blanch 1 cup cauliflower florets and 1 cup bite-sized kale until tender. Warm tomato puree, 1 can white beans (loose adaptation!), and 1 cup water, stock, or white wine. Mix the juice of one lemon, the juice of one orange, and 1/4 cup miso. Add orange mixture to soup. There's no need to heat the soup past your preferred temperature for consumption. Add chopped parsley and cilantro, and garnish with fresh pepper and olive oil.

Eat.

Chopped Salad

Oh man, this was beautiful. Unfortunately we had lots of guests and I was too distracted to take a picture. Then it was all et up. Expect a halfway decent picture the next time I have an excuses post.

Cook 1/4 pound golden beets. (Red beets will stain all of the other ingredients.) Peel and slice into attractive wedges. Blanch 1/4 pound tasty carrots and slice into rounds. Add one peeled and chopped cucumber. I also added one fennel bulb, one Fuji apple, and one red bell pepper. This made a lot of salad, and the ingredients were somewhat muddled. I'd keep it simpler- swap things in and out as it pleases you.

Make a dressing from the juice of two lemons, 1/2 cup olive oil, 1 tsp. mustard (not yellow mustard,), 1 chopped shallot or 1/4 cup finely chopped onion, and salt and pepper to taste. Dress the chopped ingredients. Allow to marinate for at least 15 minutes. (Why yes, that is a great deal of dressing. Add it anyways.)

Fine crisp salad greens like romaine or radicchio or endive. (Maybe a little more on the romaine side if you are not a fan of bitter things. Or if you married a non-fan.) Wash and dry them. Just before serving the salad, chop the leaves finely. Serve the dressed vegetables on a bed of chopped greens- it's very tasty. Eat.

Vegan Putanesca Pasta

Yes, there are perfectly good pasta sauces that come in jars. No, this one is not markedly better. Yes, I love anchovies and using them would be within the theme of this blog. It's just that half full containers of anchovies tend to molder in my fridge, and eating more than two or three a week is... intense. Also, everyone should have the recipe for whore sauce up their sleeve. (It's a good way to cover the taste of canned tomatoes. Also, if cats eat it they act amusingly unhappy.)

Serves three.

Start boiling water for pasta. Do not start cooking the sauce until the water is boiling.

Peel and coarsely chop six cloves of garlic. Chop 1/2 cup Kalamata olives and 1/2 cup Italian parsley. (If you were using anchovies, you'd soak two in water for five minutes and then chop them as well.)

When you've finished your onerous chopping duties, saute garlic and 1 tsp chile flakes in 1 tbs olive oil until the garlic is blond. (about one minute) Add the olives and 1 tbs. capers. (Or the anchovies.) Stir, and then add a 28 oz. can of diced tomatoes. Simmer for around five minutes- about the amount of time it takes to cook 1/2 pound vermicelli al dente. Add the chopped parsley to the sauce and serve over the pasta.

Eat.

Antipasto platter

Somewhere in my cold shriveled heart is a belief that a pile of bitter vegetables will make up for about a week of saturated fats, alcohol, and simple carbohydrates. It's like C and the whole cold drink on a hot day causes heart failure superstition. It's not that he believes it, it's that by now room temperature soda tastes better. So yes, after the excesses of the last holiday I am willing to call vegetables dipped in olive oil and garlic healthy and am willing to call bitter root vegetables antipasto. (Where I'm from antipasto is usually pepperoni, the saddest prosciutto, sliced mozzarella, Parmesan, and pickled pepperoncini- I feel like adding a couple of olives is pretty much the first step on a slippery slope to... a pile of bitter vegetables on a plate.)

Bagna cauda is supposed to be just ample olive oil and lots of chopped garlic, warmed gently. As someone who will take the occasional shot of vegetable oil when feeling low, oil and garlic isn't special enough for me. I added lemon and salt. (So exciting. Living the dream here.) So yes, heat one cup really good olive oil gently over a very low flame. Add six to eight cloves garlic, smashed and peeled. After about three minutes the garlic will be soft enough to smash further, if it pleases you to do so. Add the juice of two lemons and a dash of salt.

I used blanched kale, red endive, blanched carrots, sliced boiled beets with a splash of vinegar, thin sliced fennel bulb, and blanched Jerusalem artichokes. I would say to skip the carrots, but I'm pretty sure that it's the only thing everyone else ate. Seasonality is key, chickens- perhaps you are not reading this in the depths of winter and can choose from roasted peppers and ripe tomatoes and sauteed eggplant. Perhaps it is spring, and tiny baby vegetables are making themselves known. Do you wish to add some baked mushrooms? Some sweet onions? Some lovely spinach? Some olives and pickled artichoke hearts? Please do. Put whichever available vegetables that look delightful on a platter, and then dip them into the bagna cauda. (Some things- like blanched kale- require drizzling with the bagna cauda. Please eat blanched kale with a fork. For everyone's sake.)

I can feel my liver growing stronger. Hypothetically. Given holistic medicine isn't a crock.